Alberto Moreiras

The conditions for thinking about Latin America as a regional unit in transnational academic discourse have shifted over the past decades. In The Exhaustion of Difference Alberto Moreiras ponders the ramifications of this shift and draws on deconstruction, Marxian theory, philosophy, political economy, subaltern studies, literary criticism, and postcolonial studies to interrogate the minimal conditions for an effective critique of knowledge given the recent transformations of the contemporary world. What, asks Moreiras, is the function of critical reason in the present moment? What is regionalistic knowledge in the face of globalization? Can regionalistic knowledge be an effective tool for a critique of contemporary reason? What is the specificity of Latin Americanist reflection and how is it situated to deal with these questions? Through examinations of critical regionalism, restitutional excess, the historical genealogy of Latin American subalternism, testimonio literature, and the cultural politics of magical realism, Moreiras argues that while cultural studies is increasingly institutionalized and in danger of reproducing the dominant ideologies of late capitalism, it is also ripe for giving way to projects of theoretical reformulation. Ultimately, he claims, critical reason must abandon its allegiance to aesthetic-historicist projects and the destructive binaries upon which all cultural theories of modernity have been constructed. The Exhaustion of Difference makes a significant contribution to the rethinking of Latin American cultural studies.

The Politics of Latin American Cultural Studies

The Exhaustion of Difference

The personal is not political, even if politics marks it and, in many cases, determines it. Infrapolitics seeks to understand conditions of existence that are not reducible to political life and that exceed any definition of world bound to political determinations. It seeks to mobilize an exteriority without which politics could only be business or administration, that is, oppression. It demands a change in seeing and an everyday practice that subtracts from political totalization in the name of a new production of desire, of a new emancipation, and of a conception of experience that can breach the general captivation of life. In this book, Alberto Moreiras describes a form of thought aiming to provide content for a form of life and to offer a new theoretical practice for concrete existence. The book provides a genealogy of the notion of infrapolitics and places it within contemporary philosophical reflection, examining its deployment in the wake of postphenomenology and deconstruction, Lacanian analysis, the principle of anarchy, and an egalitarian symbolization of social life. In doing so, Moreiras elaborates Infrapolitics as both a general critique of the political apparatus and as an imperative horizon for existential self-understanding.

A Handbook

Infrapolitics

Pablo Lazo Briones

Patxi Lanceros

Michel Naas

Ángel Octavio Álvarez Solís

Emmanuel Biset

Zenia Yébenes

La actualidad de Jacques Derrida no se mide por la frecuencia con que su nombre se cita o se recita, o por los términos y conceptos de la deconstrucción que han sido domesticados y reusados por una fauna académica que sabe sacar provecho de ellos. Si puede plantearse la vigencia, incluso la incidencia, del pensamiento de Derrida hoy, es sólo (re)considerando su modulación, su articulación, su transversalidad en los terrenos de lo ético y lo político. Pero justo en estos terrenos se ha venido señalando en las últimas décadas tanto un problema de interpretación de su obra –¿existe o no en ella un giro de la llamada deconstrucción lingüística a una posición ético-política de mayor compromiso?, ¿la primera implicaba ya desde un principio a la segunda?– como una acusación de impertinencia –¿la estrategia deconstructiva puede vérselas con una política pragmática a la que no le interesan las consideraciones teóricas sobre ética y filosofía política, sobre la autoridad y la justicia, sobre el perdón y el cosmopolitismo, o sobre el racismo y la segregación? Los textos que componen este libro intentan contestar a estas preguntas desde muy diversos enfoques y momentos de la obra derridiana, pero acaso coinciden en la convicción de que la deconstrucción detenta un potencial de dislocación de cualquier idea preconcebida de lo ético y de lo político, de cualquier sistema de conceptualidad –metafísico o pragmático– que quiera dar por cerrada la discusión acerca de los mismos términos que quieren estabilizar un sistema de cosas.

Jacques Derrida. Ética y política

Alberto Moreiras

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